The Science of Salads

An assortment of Gilded Age salad forks, lettuce serving forks and one lettuce serving spoon — “Alexandre Dumas devotes more than 1,000 words in his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine to demonstrating that salad is not natural food for man. Only ruminants, he writes, are equipped to deal with raw greenery in their stomachs, since raw plants are dissolved not by acids but by alkalis. It is, he says, an excess of civilization that has made us take to eating raw salads. The ultimate error is to make salad accompany a roast. To eat salad with haunch of venison, or with roast pheasant or woodcock is simply culinary heresy. One spoils the other.”

The rights and wrongs of the science of dining seem to arouse passions as much as politics or bridge, and nothing is more controversial than the right way to dress a salad.

Alexandre Dumas devotes more than 1,000 words in his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine to demonstrating that salad is not natural food for man. Only ruminants, he writes, are equipped to deal with raw greenery in their stomachs, since raw plants are dissolved not by acids but by alkalis. It is, he says, an excess of civilization that has made us take to eating raw salads. The ultimate error is to make salad accompany a roast. To eat salad with haunch of venison, or with roast pheasant or woodcock is simply culinary heresy. One spoils the other. 

All game of haut gout, he considers, ought to be eaten by itself just with the sauce of its own juices. It is an act of great culinary impiety to allow your salad to be made by a servant. Salad is served at a moment when hunger is three-quarters assuaged and you need an aperitif to restore your appetite and thus it has to be perfect, prepared with loving skill and intelligence. Where, the inference is, will you find this except in the master or mistress of the house? And so the salad must be composed by one of them and at least an hour before it is due to be served. During that hour it should be turned three or four times.

Salad consists of vegetables to which certain aromatic herbs have been added, seasoned with salt, white pepper, oil, vinegar and sometimes with mustard and soya. Herbs, again, are of three kinds: pot-herbs, dressing-herbs and seasonings. There are six pot-herbs: sorrel, lettuce, white beet, mountain spinach (orach) spinach and purslane. Dressing- herbs are parsley, tarragon, chervil, chive, spring onion, savory, fennel, thyme, basil and tansy. There are twelve seasoning-herbs: garden cress, watercress, chervil, tarragon, burnet, samphire, hartshorn, lesser basil, purslane, balm and chives. When seasoning chicory you put at the bottom of the salad bowl a stale crust of bread rubbed with garlic to absorb surplus vinegar.

Until recently salad-dressing seems to have been a peculiarly French accomplishment. After the Revolution several of the aristocratic refugees in England and America made fortunes as salad-dressers. In London, a young man called d'Aubignac accumulated £80,000 in quite a short period from the exercise of this skill, in which he seems to have used considerable imagination, as he is said to have used perfumed vinegars, oils tasting of fruit, soy, ketchup and even caviare among his ingredients. — From “The Joy of Eating,” by Katie Stewart, 1937

 🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Salad Etiquette and History

Originally, long lettuce forks and matching spoons were the proper accoutrements for serving salads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eventually, by the mid 20th century, they became connected, made of plastic and mass marketed as “salad tongs,” though those who took much pride in entertaining, continued to use separate salad serving forks and spoons to serve their guests leafy, green salads.

To paint a complete portrait of the restaurant’s history, the iconic image of Man Carving a Roast should be accompanied by Man Mixing a Salad. For in haute restaurant-ology it is Man, not Woman, who rules the salad bowl.


In the 19th century wealthy men who styled themselves epicures often impressed their dining companions by rising from the table and mixing the salad. In the 20th century the custom passed into the hands of headwaiters at chi chi venues.

The tradition can be traced to peripatetic Frenchmen who wandered around Europe solemnly ministering to urban dinner parties with the contents of their small yet sacred chests of salad ingredients which included flavored vinegars, soy, caviar, truffles, anchovies, and other delectables.

In the 18th century sallad (spelled in the British manner) referred to a mixture of greens and herbs, possibly radishes, dressed with vinegar and oil and perhaps a raw egg. It could also mean chopped cabbage, known in the early 19th century as “cold” slaw. How many taverns, coffee houses, and other early eating places served salads is unknown but the number was probably very small and their salad days limited to springtime.

Although some green salads appeared on 19th century menus, the word salad more often referred to cold chopped meat or fish dressed with mayonnaise. Lobster and chicken were favorites. Combination salads and fruit salads did not come into popularity until the 20th century, largely due no doubt to the lower price of greens, vegetables, and imported bananas and pineapples.

The type of restaurant that did most to advance the green salad as a basic component of the American diet was the table d’hôte, a small French or Italian restaurant serving a fixed-price meal of about five courses. In 1844, patrons at the Café Tortoni in NYC enjoyed dinners of soup, stew-like entrees, roast meat, salads “mixed a la des Jardins,” and desserts. Head lettuce was rare, so typical salads featured romaine, chicory, dandelions, or field greens. Salad lovers particularly lauded Italian restaurants for their salads, both in the 19th and 20th centuries (despite the common appellation “Wop salad” ca. 1940-1970). In 1909 a patron wrote that Italian restaurant salads “are almost always good, and the dressing, made from red wine vinegar, is usually delicious. The mixed salad, in spring includes tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, celery, sometimes spinach and usually chives. Beet tops are also served as salad.”

In the New England countryside, on the other hand, salads were rare – and unsatisfactory. As a patron in a hotel dining room noted in 1881, “If by any chance there is lettuce on the table – for this happens rarely – and you manifest a desire to eat of it, the waiter puts before you the vinegar cruet and the sugar bowl. If you want to make a fool of yourself, call for salad oil. It will take some time to explain your meaning, and when you have done so the attendant will sneeringly inform her companions that ‘That feller eats grease on his lettis.’”

Although some thought salads were gaining popularity in the 1890s as sedentary city dwellers woke up to the wisdom of lighter fare, hotel cook Jessup Whitehead remarked in 1901 that “salads are not among the common popular dishes, and the average public seldom seems to think of them.” Many cooks had no idea how to prepare them, he added.


Salads became feminized in the 1920s. Perhaps it was the popularity of fruit salads in tea rooms, or the increasing use of flavored gelatin salads, but some male gourmets denounced women for preferring “comic salads” chosen for eye appeal rather than taste. Indeed there were some bizarre ones such as the Candlestick (illustrated), and others with names such as Clara Barton, Bon Ton, Butterfly, and Martini. Even a female tea room proprietor had to admit that “Atrocities have been committed in the name of salad.”

In the mid-20th century the tossed salad smothered under a layer of thick dressing became the standard start of a regulation meat and potatoes restaurant dinner. The high incidence of mediocre salads led syndicated columnist Inez Robb to launch a one-woman campaign in the 1960s against the two-pronged “red menace” to restaurant salads: chopped red cabbage and sludgy red-orange “French” dressing. Relief was on the way, for in the 1970s field greens returned, and ingredients rarely (but sometimes) found in salads of previous decades, such as olive oil, radicchio, and arugula came into wider use.–© Jan Whitaker, 2011

Jan Whitaker

We wish to thank Jan Whitaker for her allowing us to use another wonderful post from her blog. Says Jan, “We eat in restaurants several times a week and yet know very little about their history. I plan to dip into my archive of research and images every so often to present a little tidbit that highlights aspects of our American restaurant culture. Let me know your thoughts”- Restaurant-ing Through History

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia